ConWebBlog: The Weblog of ConWebWatch

Does WND Like Running Racist Ads On Its Website?

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:13:35 -0500

Remember when WorldNetDaily had standards for the advertising it runs?

In 2001, WND "at least temporarily" discontinued national advertising on its website "because too many are offensive to management and readers." Those allegedly offensive ads WND editor Joseph Farah disliked ranged "from the promotion of online gambling to the marketing of national television programs that, he says, he would never allow his own children to watch."

In 2009, WND railed against "Sexually provocative ads, sexually suggestive ads, sexually oriented ads and those that are in bad taste," and Farah asked readers to flag ads "of questionable merit or taste" appearing on the website.

What WND apparently doesn't find offensive, though, are racially inflammatory ads that smear the wife of the president of the United States. Wonkette has caught WND publishing the following ad on its website:

Did anybody not flag this for Farah until now? Or does Farah not find this offensive? Perhaps he should explain to his readers why this ad appears on his website.

Newsmax Promotes Ron Paul's Infinity-Gold Claim

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:43:19 -0500

Newsmax thinks this is news:

How high can the price of gold go? Former Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul thinks it could go to infinity.

Appearing on CNBC's "Futures Now," Paul explained that "excessive spending and excessive computerized money" is driving down the dollar, and in turn raising the price of gold.
"Eventually, if we're not careful, it will go to infinity, because the dollar will collapse totally," Paul said.

Uh, yeah.

WND Dishonestly Portrays CDC As Clueless On HIV

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:57:13 -0500

Steve Peacock writes in a June 16 WorldNetDaily article:

If one believes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the reason certain populations in the U.S. report more cases of HIV isn’t a mystery.

Except to the Obama administration.
The administration seems perplexed about why homosexuals – whom it defines as “men who have sex with men”– along with racial and ethnic minorities, transgender persons and youths 13-29 continue to represent the “overwhelming majority” of the 50,000 new HIV cases reported annually in the U.S.

So now the Obama administration, through the CDC, is working to amass a list of researchers who could investigate and publish, independently of the government, conclusions about “this health disparity in the HIV epidemic,” according to a sources-sought notice that WND discovered via routine database research.

That's an apparently deliberate misinterpretation of what the CDC is looking for. It's not questioning that "men who have sex with men" make up the “overwhelming majority” of new HIV cases -- it wants to know why new cases of HIV has remained relatively constant and arguably high in recent years. From the CDC solicitation Peacock cites:

Thirty years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, many advances have been made in HIV prevention, care, and treatment. Great strides have been made in the development of faster and more efficient HIV testing and screening technologies, and in medical treatments that allow HIV-positive persons to live long and productive lives. Yet despite these efforts, approximately 50,000 Americans are infected with HIV each year, and the overwhelming majority of these new infections remain among minority and vulnerable communities, such as racial and ethnic minorities, men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender persons, and youth (aged 13-29). This health disparity in the HIV epidemic is anchored in long-standing social issues, such as racism, discrimination, stigma, poverty, incarceration, and healthcare inequity.

In July, 2010, President Barack Obama unveiled the first National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) for the United States, a coordinated national response to reduce the burden of HIV in the U.S. by 2015. The strategy outlined 3 major goals: (1) reduce the number of people who become infected with HIV; (2) increase access to care and improve health outcomes for people living with HIV; and (3) reduce HIV-related health disparities. The strategy emphasizes focusing efforts in communities where HIV is highly concentrated, and by addressing HIV in these communities, lowering the collective HIV risk of all Americans.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention (DHAP) provides leadership in helping to control the HIV epidemic. To continue these efforts and in alignment with NHAS, DHAP requires the support of an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract to (1) conduct qualitative inquiry methods to help answer timely questions related to HIV prevention, and (2) to use the findings to strengthen existing and future HIV prevention efforts. It is increasingly important to understand the issues, behaviors, barriers and facilitators experienced by those at greatest risk for HIV to better focus prevention programs and successfully reduce the number of persons infected with HIV, especially in vulnerable communities, and increase access to HIV treatment and care for all HIV-positive persons.

Peacock's portrayal of the CDC and the Obama administration as being in denial that gays make up most cases of HIV is very dishonest. But do we expect anything else from WND?

NewsBusters' Double Standard on News Orgs Editing Stories After Publication

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:03:28 -0500

Tim Graham uses a June 16 NewsBusters post to complain that the New York Times "found it advantageous to edit out an America-hating Iranian who wished the Times building would burn down" and other supposedly pertinent information.

Certainly the Media Resarch Center, where Graham is director of media analysis, would not be so gauche as to make substantive changes in articles after publication and not tell their readers, right?

That's a trick question -- of course the MRC has done this.

As we've documented, a June 14 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr falsely claim that Mark Sanford "resigned as governor of South Carolina in 2009 after he revealed that he was having an extra-marital affair."CNS later removed the entire paragraph containing the false claim about Sanford resigning -- which also means the reference to Sanford's affair has also been deleted. CNS also didn't bother to tell readers that Starr's article has been corrected.

Shouldn't Graham hold the organization for which he works to the very same journalistic standards he applies to others?

WND Whitewashes Racism of The Afrikaners It Quotes

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 23:30:54 -0500

A June 15 WorldNetDaily article by Alex Newman (who normally writes for the New American, the magazine published by the far-right John Birch Society, which tells you the standards WND is hiring writers by these days) worries about "the future of increasingly marginalized European-descent South Africans." But the people Newman quotes in support of that view tend to be right-wing extremists.

Newman writes:

Hundreds of thousands of economically excluded Afrikaners now live in squalid squatter camps throughout South Africa without so much as running water or electricity.

Hundreds of thousands more have fled to Western nations seeking a better life.

“The advent of black rule has been devastating for whole groups of whites, even highly educated ones,” Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, PRAAG, told WND.

To provide a clue as to where Roodt's racial views lie, he wrote a 2012 article for the white nationalist website American Renaissancein which he approvingly quotes AmRen leader Jared Taylor asking that "the Republican Party be loyal to its electorate and become the unabashed champion of white interests" and writes, "We need to form a global network to keep America from falling into the hands of anti-white zealots. ... If the United States goes the way of South Africa, whites everywhere will be in danger."

Roodt was also a fellow traveler of Eugene Terreblanche, a white supremacist (and favorite of WND columnist Ilana Mercer) who headed the militant Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) until he was killed by two black farmhands.

Newman also writes:

For an increasingly significant segment of the population, it is becoming clearer that today’s South Africa is simply not sustainable in the long term.

“South Africa is a colonial construct, currently an incompatible, unsustainable mix,” International Afrikaner Society President Hannes Louw told WND.

Louw is reportedly a speaker at this weekend's national conference of the League of the South, the neo-Confederate fringe group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “European Americans.”

Newman also touts how Genocide Watch "raised its alert level on South Africa to stage 6 out of 8 – the planning and preparation phase of the extermination process" without mentioning that the group lowered the level to stage 5 due to developments within the country.

Finally, Newman seems to want to play down the offensive parts of apartheid, describing its end in 1994 as "when the Western establishment and Soviet powers finally succeeded in forcing the anti-communist, white-dominated government to relinquish power."

Newsmax Columnist: TSA's Groping Softened Us Up for NSA's Snooping

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:11:49 -0500

Here’s a question I asked myself yesterday: Would I rather have my phone records collected and readied for possible inspection by the National Security Agency, or have my genitalia scrutinized by the Transportation Security Administration?

One answer, of course, is, why choose? In today’s America you can have both.

But my preference is the latter, and not only because the TSA Genitalia-Inspection Service has been doing its business on me (and you, too!) for years now and I’ve grown used to it in the way that Americans too readily accept indignities foisted on them by large institutions, including, but not limited to, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and Facebook.

Here’s my reasoning: It is better, I think, to suffer the stick-’em-up humiliation of the TSA’s naked body scan machines, because while they can see through our clothes, at least they can’t see inside our heads. Not yet, anyway.

-- Jeffrey Goldberg, June 12 Newsmax column

Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Supersize WorldNetDaily Edition

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:19:59 -0500

There is vulgar, there is dishonest, and then there is Obama. There is contemptible, there is empyema, and then there is Obama. Obama is the transmogrification of diseased exuviae into a biped.

-- Mychal Massie, June 10 WorldNetDaily column

Obama’s goal is stomping out all opposition. That’s his end game – and he has been and continues to use every component of the federal government to achieve it.
What Obama most fears is that people will recognize his objectives – and they are beginning to do just that.
When he tells you to “reject those voices,” he’s like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. He doesn’t want his constituency to see reality. He doesn’t want you to recognize that tyranny is indeed lurking around the corner – or even closer than that. He especially doesn’t want to people to recognize that he is the face of that tyranny.

-- Joseph Farah, June 10 WND column

In its impact on both our international and our domestic security and welfare, Obama’s abusive occupation of the White House casts a grim shadow over the prospects for the survival of America’s constitutional liberty. In what has been dubbed the system of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution, impeachment is the ultimate check, intended to impede or stop dangerous abuses before they have gathered such force, in terms of inimical foreign and domestic powers, that they can be resisted by no means short of civil war. By failing to carry out their responsibility to deploy this constitutionally strategic resource, the GOP is allowing an ever deepening cloud of distrust, suspicion, anger and fear to spread throughout the body politic. To be sure, every new revelation of abuse rouses the people’s concern and anger. But the other edge of the sword is the chilling effect it may have on people more inclined to fear than to resist what they perceive as a growing and unchallenged reality of power.

-- Alan Keyes, June 11 WND column

So there is no media pressure to bring the matter to court, and no political pressure either. A state of such fear and funk now subsists in the United States that no one will touch the birth certificate issue.
And that is a shame, because the in-your-face forged “birth certificate” is arguably the biggest news story of our generation. In defiance of your Constitution, the current occupant of the White House clings to office even though his endorsement of the bogus document creates serious doubt about whether he is entitled to hold that office, and still more serious doubt about his fitness to hold it even if he were constitutionally entitled.

-- Christopher Monckton, June 11 WND column

Presuming ignorance of Obama’s Marxism, we still have common-sense deductions, such as: If the administration were genuinely concerned about national security, it stands to reason that it would have refrained from enacting innumerable policies which dramatically compromised our national security. The president might not have projected weak foreign policy, facilitated jihadists abroad, tolerated them domestically and insinuated Muslim Brotherhood operatives in high-level government positions. How, with all of their expertise and technology, was the government unable to stop two kids with bombs in their backpacks – of whom the FBI were already aware – from detonating them in Boston on the 15^th of April?

-- Erik Rush, June 12 WND column

The Obama faction is now openly engaged in a campaign to use the power of the U.S. government to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. Because they have not or will not let themselves be tutored by America’s founders, the GOP majority in the House of Representatives is showing itself to be incompetent to deal with it. Obama’s disciples of Marx and Saul Alinsky every day parade abuses infuriating to a solid majority of the American people. But instead of a strategic response that rallies this aggrieved majority in defense of America’s liberty, the so-called leaders of the party that claims to stand in opposition to Obama’s push for totalitarian socialism offer a ragged, piecemeal response.

-- Alan Keyes, June 13 WND column

This isn’t a left or right issue. This is about freedom. This is about the rule of law. Barack Obama has exposed himself as an enemy of the Constitution, an enemy of the American people – all of the American people – whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican.

Liberals, let’s agree to disagree where we disagree. Likewise, let’s agree to agree where we agree.

Let’s come together and do something about America’s Barack Obama problem.

-- Matt Barber, June 14 WND column

CNS Finds Even More 'Wasteful' Spending on LGBT Issues

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:51:56 -0500

CNSNews.com's special gaydar for finding supposedly wasteful federal spending on LGBT issues has kicked in again:

A June 14 article by Melanie Hunter states that "The State Department through its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) is planning to spend $450,000 in taxpayer dollars 'to support programs that increase protection of transgender persons who face acute forms of violence and harassment.'"
A June 17 article by Ryan Kierman states: "The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has authorized a three-year study to find out why some HIV-positive homosexual men in Kenya do not seek the free treatment that American taxpayers already are funding."

Of the 27 articles currently on CNS' Waste Watch page, six involve LGBT issues. This doesn't include two early "Waste Watch" entries involving health issues of lesbians. CNS doesn't explain why these programs -- or any of the others on its list -- are considered "waste."

Larry Klayman Quotes Himself

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:58:17 -0500

How narcissistic is Larry Klayman? He uses his column as an excuse to quote at length from his own press releases.

From Klayman's June 14 WorldNetDaily column:

Earlier this week, I filed two class actions lawsuits over the NSA’s PRISM scheme. Here is how one of my press releases described the cases and the large stakes involved.

“Having already filed a $3 billion class action with regard to the alleged government privacy abuse by the Obama administration and Verizon, Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and now Freedom Watch, and a former Justice Department prosecutor, filed a new $20 billion dollar companion class action suit in D.C. federal court today. Like the prior class action suit concerning Verizon, this new case names President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, the heads of the NSA and the 12 other companies who have collaborated with the government in violating the privacy and other constitutional rights of American citizens. The companies named in the suit which are tied to the government’s PRISM-NSA scheme are: Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, YouTube, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, and Yahoo. The users and subscribers of these companies comprise, combined with the Verizon class plaintiffs, a majority of the entire U.S. citizenry and thus these complementary class action suits pit the American people against their government and corporate enablers.”

“This and the Verizon class action will serve to unify all political and social persuasions in our great nation to wage a second American revolution, one that is peaceful and legal – but pursued with great resolve and force. Government dishonesty and tyranny against the people have reached historic proportions during the last three administrations in particular, and the time has come for We the People to rise up and reclaim control of our nation. If not, the government will control us, and this will mark the end of individual liberties. The American people can thus use these class actions to ‘man the barricades of freedom’ against the establishment government despots and their corporate enablers who seek to enslave them through coercive abuses their privacy. This Orwellian power grab can only be intended to blackmail the masses into submission in order that these modern day greedy tyrants achieve their corrupt ends.” [See www.freedomwatchusa.org.]

Has Klayman turned into the new Andy Martin in terms of deluded self-regard and legal incompetence? It appears so.

NewsBusters' Double Standard on Conflicts of Interest

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:46:35 -0500

A June 15 NewsBusters post by John Williams complains that "NPR’s rising young celebrity-like star Ari Shapiro, White House Correspondent," has been allowed to stay in that position despite the fact that his spouse, Michael Gottlieb, works in the Obama White House Counsel’s office. "Despite this, NPR has kept Shapiro in the same position as White House Correspondent and has never disclosed on-air or on its website this significant conflict of interest," Williams adds.

Williams' complaint might be taken more seriously if he and his fellow NewsBusters weren't ignoring media conflicts of interest on their own side of the aisle.

In a NewsBusters item posted just a few hours before Williams' item, Randy Hall touts how Fox News host Greta Van Susteren is "delighted" to have Sarah Palin back at Fox as a contributor because "it will drive her critics crazy! They are obsessed with her!”

Unmentioned by Hall or anyone else at NewsBusters: Van Susteren's husband, John Coale, has served as an adviser to Palin, starting both her political action committee, SarahPAC, and her legal defense fund. Coale also rode along with Palin on parts of her 2011 bus tour.

That seems like a conflict of interest that should be disclosed, but NewsBusters is apparently giving Van Susteren a pass because she works for a right-wing-friendly channel.